Excellent description of Tibetan Buddhist Tantra; the transformation of desire and pleasures into transcendental experiences of deep penetrative awareness; this is absolutely amazing!

There is a wonderful universality of Tantra that goes far beyond the specific traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, this book occasionally loses itself in these traditions especially when describing the role of a lama/guru/teacher and the divisive view of "western" people contrasted with Tibetan; an over-simplification that ultimately does no benefit or justice to the wonderful teaching otherwise contained in these writings.

For example, It would perhaps be more useful to view the descriptions of reincarnation as strictly metaphorical, representing actual and ephemeral mental states (from moment-to-moment rather than spanning physical lifetimes), in doing so there arises a profound awareness that can radically alter consciousness to cease the very ego grasping and striving so artfully described in this book.

In a nutshell, this book presents all the keys necessary for the cessation of suffering and a profound awareness/experience of bliss, but then rather than go through that door it instead gets lost in the metaphor of tradition and occasionally gets stuck in the very faulty conventional wisdom that the world today is somehow in a worse state of affairs than it was in the past (somehow not following through on its own description of "dependent arising", that the world today is exactly as it became as a result of everything that occurred in the past).

I gave this a 3, but really, parts of it were a 5 (containing some of the best passages I have ever read on Tantra) while other parts a 1 (containing easily refuted logic and divisive views of human nature).